I think I found it. The perfect solution to teaching yourself HOW to make oscommerce LOOK good.

We all know that the stock oscommerce will NOT turn your e-commerce business into a world dominating retailer. Its made to be a skeleton which you should build on.. The thing is, unless you are an expert coder, you can’t just jump in and make it look like the professional store that you want. You can have all of the graphic design skills in the world, but you NEED to know how to change what you see on your screen into what you see in your mind.

So this is the book i URGE you to pick up:
oscbook designing oscommerce

WHY buy a book when you can get all the info you ever want on the internet for free??
Well, thats an easy one. Because contrary to popular belief, forums do NOT give you instant feedback.. Books do! The only thing you have to do with a book is look in the index. With a forum you have to first search your question, then weed through all of the useless posts, then when you can’t find the answer, ask the question and HOPE someone sees it before it gets buried in the sea of useless stupid ANNOYING questions like “How do I change the text on my website”BOOKS will always be sitting there on your shelf, so when you need to re-teach something to yourself, you don’t have to pull your hair out because you didn’t bookmark that page.
IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN GETTING STARTED MAKING YOUR SITE LOOK LIKE YOU ENVISION IT – click the BUY NOW button to go to paypal and checkout to get your book ASAP
If you want more information, you can visit the writer’s website HERE

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Feel free to leave a comment with more information too! I’m trying to make this blog as interactive as possible, so the more people comment, the happier I am, and the happier I am, the more I will write.. And i KNOW you guys want that!

I have officially been working with oscommerce for 2 years now, and I started by learning the good old fashioned way – that is MAKING MISTAKES!! Thank god that I have the good frame of mind to backup my work before i even START thinking about making changes to my site.. But here’s the thing, there are a few tips that can make doing things in oscommerce a tad bit easier.

First is ALWAYS MAKE A BACKUP!!! because you WILL mess up, and you WILL cry long hours if you dont
second, USE A MERGE PROGRAM! Its so obvious, but yet people still forget that they exist. When you install contributions, dont go through the code piece by piece, just open the contribution file and your file side by side and merge them. You can use WinMerge(for PC) or DiffMerge(for mac) BOTH are free, and both will save you a LOT of time.

and FINALLY. GOOGLE YOUR ISSUES!! There is nothing more annoying than going to a user forum and seeing the same issue posted over and over again. And the thing is, these people THINK they will get instant gratification because they THINK people will just come by and give them an answer. Well, that’s rare true. If you simply go head over to google and type in the following:
site:forums.oscommerce.com then paste your error here
You will get ALL of the threads on that site that reference your particular error.

Now there is one bit of info that I have to give you that might be common sense to one person, but not to the others.. When you copy your error, DONT include your file path. No one else in the world is going to have the same file path as you. So JUST include the error. PLEASE.

So that’s it for now. It know its been a while since I updated, but i promise, i will be back more often. I will try to update at minumum once a week. In the meantime, if you have questions about oscommerce, please post them here. I will be happy to answer them.

This is going to be a short one just because I dont have the time today. Its my mom-in-laws surprised 60th B-day. YIPEE FOR HER!!
Anyways, i am at the first stage of acceptance and that is admitting that I have a problem.I AM NOT TECH-Y
I would like to think I am. I mean, I made a fully customized e-commerce store with all the bells and whistles! But really, what did I do other than read some instructions and use common sense to figure most of it out. The other parts I rely on other people to use.
I must have called
Host Monster.com 24 hr Support t about 10000 times with supid questions. Luckily they never call me an idiot to my face!

Anyways, lost sleep last night over my most current issue:
I can not get my page splits on my admin site to work – it splits the pages, but the page links are not clickable, which means i loose all that stuff on those other pages!

I will post back with the fix – if someone tells me one.. Because again, i am NOT tech-y

Hah, i was in a forum today, trying to figure out this debocle with my shared SSL (secure socket layer). What i realized was, my website NEEDS to have a cookie in the users browser, but when you visit a SHARED ssl page, the domain changes, and since the cookie is only valid on the original domain, every time the person goes to a secure page, they loose their shopping cart contents!!! What a MESS!!

Anways, I was just learning all of that stuff above by trial and error. THEN, someone came of the forum and said to me “I will try to put this in the most simple terms possible since you are not really Tech-y”

HAH!! for an average person, I feel that I am rather “tech-y” I mean, when I explain to other people how I built my website and the stuff that I have done, they look at me like I have three heads. That makes me pretty “tech-y” i would think. I guess there are levels of “tech-y” and when you are in a support forum for a complicated script, people like us probably are the least “tech-y” people there. Ok, well not the LEAST, the people who are the least “tech-y” people there are the ones who don’t know what php is. People like me one year ago.

SO anyways, I still feel rather proud of myself for being able to completely confuse people with my mumbojumbo “tech-y” talk, even if it is the average folk.

So today’s lesson is:
A shared SSL is always going to change the domain name in the user’s url because the secure pages reside on that secure server, which is being shared.
That means that if your domain name (mydomain.com) puts a cookie in the persons’ browser to be used, when the user goes to a secure page (secure.host.com/mydomain) then the cookie is not valid and will not be used resulting in the loss of infomation that was stored on that cookie.

You can get around this by using session ids, which we will cover later. But that is only good for some scripts which can use session ids. My particular one can not.

Anways, I love my host for sitting on the phone with me last night a midnite helping me with things (even with CODING which they arent supposed to do) and for now officially getting me a nice, cheap private SSL and static IP
I ❤ Hostmonster.com

Well, its not a tutorial on how to design your website, although i will be giving some quick How-To’s as I figure things out.

I have been hack-fully (yep its MY word) building a php based shopping cart website using oscommerce for about a year now. I have never, in my life, taken any class or even had a tutor, so yes – I AM A HACK.

The code breakers club is what we over at the oscommerce forums have been calling ourselves.

So anyways, here it is.. The code breaker’s club blog full of fun information.
And just to start, i wanted to share with you a nice little tidbit of information i have. And that would be the best host that I have found for people like me, who are website design clueless.

These people are awesome for a number of reasons. The best reason is that they have actual english speaking people right here in the USA (Ohio i believe) that are actually read live computer geeks.

When i FIRST started, i had no idea how to get my website from my computer to the internet. I created this cheesey little thing on iWeb and had NO CLUE what to do. I called <a href=”http://www.hostmonster.com/track/lindsayanng/text1″>Hostmonster</a&gt; and spent about an hour and a half on the phone with the guy, who didn’t just laugh at me for being an idiot, but actually explained web design 101 to me, and even TAUGHT ME HOW TO USE DREAMWEAVER.. way above and beyond the call of duty.
So anyways, if you are new at this, and would liek a real host with real feautures and real help, try them. They’re cheap too (but not too cheap, if it sounds too good to be true, they are – Globat is a good example)

So there it is, my very first post on my very first ever BLOG! woo hoo.. can i get a pat on the back please?